Soundings 87 Summer/Autumn 2024

Contents

Editorial: Change under an authoritarian sign, pages 4‑13
Dave Featherstone Free to download

A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies, pages 18‑37
Hashem Abushama Free to download
Israel has imposed different forms of settler colonialism across the map of historic Palestine, but there is no inevitability about future outcomes

Queer Ukraine perspectives, pages 38‑52
Debs Grayson talks to T and Vlada, the DViJKA collective
Why Ukrainians need solidarity from the British left

China: the state and the economy under Xi Jinping, pages 53‑75
Gavin Poynter
How does the Chinese Communist Party navigate its way through the contradictions and tensions of managing a capitalist economy?

Searching for a home: the bitter experiences of Afghanistani ‘returnees’, pages 76‑90
Khadija Abbasi
Negotiating the language, culture and social norms of one’s ‘homeland’ can be a painful and difficult experience

Reviews, pages 91‑104
Free to download

Resisting racial police warfare through radical history, pages 105‑116
Jasbinder Nijjar
Matters of history, remembrance and memory are crucial to the survival of a radical democracy. When people cease to remember, politics loses its emancipatory possibilities, and individual and collective actions that can resurrect the unkept promises of the past disappear.

The return of public ownership amidst neoliberal mutation, pages 117‑133
Andrew Cumbers
When we win power, it will be to give it to you because we believe in democracy and we believe in you … In our first hundred days we will start the process of bringing water and energy into public ownership. We’ll set up boards to run these utilities made up of who? The customer, and you, the worker, as well as representatives from local councils, metro mayors and others. We’ll make sure decisions are taken locally by those who understand the services - those who use them and deliver them.

Has ‘the great moving right show’ stopped, pages 134‑146
Michael Rustin
How will the new Labour government compare to its New Labour predecessors?

Change! (in moderation): Labourism, Starmer and the conjuncture, pages 147‑161
John Clarke
If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.